


In Every End, A New Beginning

by strange_h3arts



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: 00Silva, Angst, M/M, Pre-Skyfall, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-23
Packaged: 2017-12-03 09:35:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strange_h3arts/pseuds/strange_h3arts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"...Now, however, as the weeks drag on and the last vestiges of hope finally wither away, something inside of Tiago has broken. His infatuation with M and all that she stands for has rotted away, leaving a festering sore of hatred where his heart had once been. Tiago has been forgotten: the prodigal son who would never return. This betrayal is unforgivable."</p><p>This follows the physical and mental transformation of Tiago to Silva after his capture by the Chinese. Warning: this isn't a happy story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Every End, A New Beginning

_“Double-oh nine, are you ready for this?”_

_“Yes, mum,” Tiago replies sardonically, shooting a lopsided smirk at M as he lounges in the seat opposite her desk._

_“Then you can get the hell out of my office,” M snaps, her sharp tone belying the visible affection in her eyes._

_“With pleasure,” Tiago shoots back, beaming. He slowly rises from his chair and stretches luxuriously, M glaring at him all the while._

_Tiago turns and begins to saunter out of the office, pausing at the door when he hears M speak again._

_“Double oh-nine. Be careful out there- don’t overstep your boundaries. You know what I mean.”_

_“I’m sure I don’t,” Tiago grins, giving her a mock salute. His eyes soften momentarily as he notices the glimmer of anxiety in M’s eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you soon.”_

\--

China, 1997

Tiago had always imagined that Hell would be sweltering hot. “A prison of fire to end all sin,” his grandmother once told him years ago. But now, as he lies in chains in on the floor of anonymous cell in Guangdong Province, he thinks that Hell must be something much like this: wet, desolate, and cold. So cold. Tiago coughs weakly, sending a spasm of pain through his broken ribs. He has lost count of the weeks that he had been here. Day and night have no meaning in prison- there are no windows, no natural light, and the only vestige of passing time is the piece of moldy bread he’s given every 24 hours or so.

Tiago runs a tongue experimentally over his infected gums, swollen and painful after the latest tooth extraction. _Lucky they haven’t taken all of my teeth_ , Tiago thinks vaguely, smiling at the temptation to break the cyanide capsule in his back left molar. He pushes back the thought, inwardly chastising himself. It hasn’t come to that yet. _Not yet._

A faint groaning noise emanates from the cell next to his- the other prisoner is stirring. Tiago doesn’t know his name, or anything about him for that matter. The man speaks Cantonese, and Tiago is only moderately fluent in Mandarin. It is a shame, really: perhaps if they could speak to one another, they could slow the inexorable descent into madness.

Tiago closes his eyes and thinks of England. His love for M (and yes, it is love, but not in a sexual way. It is adoration, the sort of worship that a young child feels for a parent) had bloomed strong in his captivity- at least for the first few months. The thought of her and the unspoken promise of his rescue by MI6 was intoxicating. Those unquenchable dreams were the only reason he has lasted this long. 

Now, however, as the weeks drag on and the last vestiges of hope finally wither away, something inside of Tiago has broken. His infatuation with M and all that she stands for has rotted away, leaving a festering sore of hatred where his heart had once been. Tiago has been forgotten: the prodigal son who would never return. This betrayal is unforgivable.

Tiago shuts his eyes tightly and makes a small strangled noise, clenching his bloody hands at his sides. This descent into memory is too much for him. He curls in on himself on the damp floor, the rough stone scraping his already bruised and emaciated body. Tiago lets out a rattling exhale, attempting to calm himself. There’s no use getting worked up over a woman whom he would never see again- not in this life, at least. Better to dwell on happy memories.

Tiago pictures his grandmother, beckoning him with outstretched arms. What would she say if she could see him now?

Tiago smiles as he imagines her approaching his cell door and producing a key from her worn gingham apron. “Tiago,” she says as she parts the iron bars, her warm nut-brown face creased with worry. “What have they done to you?” Tiago can almost feel the soft caress of her hand on his forehead, her kiss on his dirt-stained cheek. She smells as she had always smelled: like vanilla.

Tears begin to form at the corners of his eyes as the daydream fades, leaving him alone in the dimly lit cell. He pushes them back.

He tries to fall asleep. It’s the only thing he can do, really- it makes him forget his pain and hunger, and in his dreams he is always free. The only danger is dreaming of M: then, he wakes up screaming.

Finally Tiago drifts off, an unspoken prayer on his lips. 

\--

The next day is the beginning of the end.

At dawn, two armed guards enter his cell and put him in handcuffs that rub his wrists raw. “Where are you taking me?” Tiago asks hoarsely in Mandarin as they drag him into the hallway, already knowing that it is useless. They never speak to him directly unless they’re torturing him.

They bring him into a room that he has never seen before. Cinder block walls, a drain on the concrete floor -- _for the blood_ , Tiago’s brain supplies him-- and a lone dentist’s chair with arm and leg restraints.

One guard roughly uncuffs his wrists, and the other shoves him down into the chair and tightens the restraints so that they bite into his skin.

“Look, he’s shaking,” says one of the guards with a harsh laugh, spitting in Tiago’s face.

“Are you scared?” the other asks him slyly, walking around Tiago’s immobilized body with measured steps. “You shouldn’t be. Today is your lucky day: tell us how you hacked our system and we’ll let you go.”

Tiago stares at him, a jaded grin creeping at the edge of his lips. “No you won’t. I said that I’m not going to tell you- not ever. Why don’t you just kill me?”

The guard simply leers at him, his eyes cold and inscrutable. “Because that wouldn’t be any fun. We want to hear you scream.”

Tiago closes his eyes and lets out a rattling exhale as he sees the knife, shining dully as it slides with a faint slicing noise from the second guard’s pocket. _Stay calm. Stay calm._

“No. Look at me. _Look at me_ ,” the guard whispers as he bent closer into Tiago’s face, his breath hot and sour against his skin.

Tiago forces himself to open his eyes. There is no way out of this.

The first cut feels like he’s being burned alive. The second cut, like he’s being gutted. Sweat and tears pour down Tiago’s face, but he doesn’t make a sound.

As the guard slowly slices open his skin, Tiago distracts himself by watching the blood thickly flow down the drain at his feet. Black spots grow at the edge of his vision.

Finally it’s over. “Beautiful,” the guard murmurs, stepping back to examine his handiwork.

It vaguely registers in Tiago’s clouded brain that the man has carved the character for “worthless” into his chest.

“So frustrating that you don’t make a sound,” the other guard muses, absentmindedly reaching for Tiago’s filthy hand as if to hold it. “Why not?” he asks Tiago conversationally as he breaks his index finger, smiling as the bones crunch in his grasp.

“Perhaps we’re using the wrong… tactics,” the other guard responds, fixing Tiago with a smile that makes his blood run icy. “Perhaps he needs something a little different to make him scream.”

\--

They rape him. It isn’t the first time, but it never hurts any less.

\--

When it’s over, they take Tiago back to his cell and shove him down onto the concrete floor, kicking him in the ribs until he sobs from agony and humiliation.

They leave him there, laughing.

Tiago lies on the cold floor, his cuts weeping and his body shaking uncontrollably. He feels… hollow. Like there is nothing left inside of him. Automatically, he reaches a tentative hand down the waistband of his pants and gently checks for damage, wincing as his palm brushes against rapidly forming bruises. When he brings his fingertips out and looks at them in the dim light, they are bloody.

Tiago slowly raises himself to a sitting position, his entire body aching and the wounds on his chest screaming out in protest. A shuddering sob escaping his chest, and he wraps his arms around himself tightly. This is the end.

And then suddenly, it hits him: he knows what he has to do.

“I’m sorry, M,” Tiago whispers to himself, his chest hitching in a strange mixture of love and hatred as he speaks her name. “I just can’t do this anymore.”

As he speaks these words, Tiago is finally calm. Slowly, dreamily, he reaches a bloody hand into the back of his mouth and pulls out his back left molar with little effort, the long-dead tooth sliding out of his gums with a faint click. Tiago shakes the cyanide capsule out into his palm and regards the innocuous-looking pill with a relieved smile. This has been on his mind for months, and now, he can no longer wait.

He glances over to the adjacent cell and sees his fellow prisoner silently watching him, his eyes dark and knowing. Tiago slowly raises a finger to his lips and winks, suddenly possessed with incongruous glee. _“Shh.”_

Tiago gingerly places the capsule in his mouth, wincing as the powdery surface burns his tongue. Steeling himself, he closes his eyes. “ _Perdóname_ ,” Tiago whispers, the words almost inaudible.

Then he bites down.

\--

The pain is blinding. As he writhes on the floor of his cell with his left jawbone disintegrating into bloody mush, Tiago hears an unnatural gargling noise and for a moment, he’s confused. Where is it coming from?

Then he realized that it’s coming from him.

Through quickly blurring vision Tiago notices that the prisoner next to him is panicking, rattling the bars of his cell and screaming for help. Tiago wants to tell him to stop; that soon it would all be over, but he has lost the ability to speak.

The acid feels like it’s burning all his insides. _Please._ _Make it stop_ , Tiago thinks frantically, his body involuntarily contorting as the poison enters his bloodstream.

_Make it stop._

\--

The next few hours are a blur as Tiago slips in and out of consciousness. He is barely breathing when the guards run in, immediately shocked into silence at the sight of his raw, caved-in face.

They zip him up in a body bag, thinking he is dead- or at least is going to be soon. Tiago’s head lolls limply on his neck as one of the guards hoists him over his shoulder, cursing violently.

“ _Fuck_ , he’s gone and offed himself. I thought we checked him for pills!” one man snaps at the other, shaking Tiago’s body for emphasis.

“Well, it’s too late now. What the fuck are we going to do with the body? This is an embarrassment. We can’t let anyone find him like this,” the other guard responds sharply, walking out of the cell and into the hallway.

A pause as they struggle to find a solution. Finally the first guard pipes up.

“We could… ah, shit. Let’s leave him down by the dump. The barge comes tonight- maybe it’ll take him out to sea with the other trash.”

The second guard sighs, exasperated. “All right. Come on, we don’t have all day…”

Their voices fade into nothingness once more as Tiago falls back into unconsciousness.

\--

They put the body bag in a trash pile on the water’s edge, covering it with plastic bottles and dirty sheets of cardboard. And then they leave, not bothering to check if Tiago is breathing.

He is.

Inside the bag, Tiago’s chest moves up and down shallowly, his breaths labored and rattling. He is awake, but it’s like he’s been drugged: his head spins dizzily, and his body is covered in a sickly sheen of sweat. One side of his face is mottled red and hung slackly where his jawbone had once been, the skin partially eroding around his upper lip. Strangely, blessedly, there is no pain.

Tiago feels empty. Is this death?

Suddenly, the sound of someone faintly speaking in Mandarin drifts over from his left side. 

Crushing disappointment overwhelms him: he is alive. Tiago feels hot angry tears spill down his face, burning the raw patches on his jaw. He begins to scream like a wild animal, the sound watery and distorted as it passes through his ravaged vocal chords.

The voices grow stronger, probably those of garbage men. They are close enough that Tiago can just understand what they’re saying.

“Did you hear that?”

“Yeah. Probably an animal.”

“I don’t know… it didn’t sound like an animal to me.”

Tiago hears the crunch of their boots as the men pick their way around the trash to stand near the pile where he’s buried.

“ _Help_ ,” Tiago hears himself croak in the foreign tongue, his ruined voice distorting the tone to near incomprehension.

The two men freeze.

“I think it came from that pile,” one of them whispers, tentatively edging closer to where Tiago lies.

“Do you see that?” says the other, a note of fear in his voice. “It looks like a body bag.”

Tiago feels the ground shift as the first man pulls his bag out of the trash pile, grunting with effort.

“Should I open it?” The two men debate for a moment, nervous.

Tiago feels a wave of nausea overwhelm him and he lets out a soft moan, causing one of the men to jump back with a strangled yelp. “It’s alive! Open it!”

Tiago hears the faint slide of a zipper, and his world is flooded with blinding light. As his eyes adjust, he can make out the figures of two men standing above him. One of them gags.

_“Oh, shit.”_

\--

The next several weeks are a blur of endless medications and surgeries. When he is taken to the hospital in Guangzhou, the doctors give him a few days at most. Maybe hours.

But he doesn’t die. Slowly they nurse him back to health, feeding him through a tube and bandaging the cuts and burns that cover his emaciated body.

Tiago sleeps most of the time, primarily as a way to forget. Each time, he prays that he won’t wake up.

Finally he is strong enough to stand by himself. When the doctors finally leave and Tiago is alone in his hospital bed, he is possessed by the urge to look at himself in a mirror. To see what they have done to him. Slowly, he rises from his cot and walks across the room, his steps small and labored. The bathroom is dark, and his reflection is obscured in shadows for the moment.

Steeling himself, Tiago flips the switch and looks at his reflection for the first time in six months.

Staring back at him from beneath the glass is a corpse.

His skin is pallid and sallow, and one of his eyes sags grotesquely as if it has come loose from its socket. Where his left jawbone had once been there is only a thin flap of skin, his cheek slack and hollow as if made of melting wax. Tiago bares his teeth and is horrified to see only a greenish row of crumbling pegs, partially corroded away by the cyanide.

His hair is the most unexpected part. Once chestnut-brown and shining with health, it is now lank, filthy and dominated by great patches of silver. _Is that even possible?_ Tiago wonders to himself, staring in shock at the dull grey strands. He suddenly remembers reading as a boy how Marie Antoinette’s hair had turned white the night before she lost her head to the guillotine.

 _How appropriate_ , Tiago thinks, parting his lips and inspecting the empty cavern that had once been the roof of his mouth. _Now I look as old as I feel._

\--

Days pass. Boredom consumes him. Tiago wishes he had a computer.

\--

A nurse tentatively enters his room one morning, and Tiago feels his face involuntarily break into a grimace as he registers the pity in her eyes.

“Mr. Rodriguez,” she says soothingly, as if Tiago is a wild animal that might suddenly lash out at her, “our plastic surgery team has constructed a prosthesis that will replace your upper teeth and left jaw. If it works the way it’s supposed to, it should also improve your ability to speak and eat dramatically.”

The nurse produces the prosthesis from behind her back and holds it out to Tiago, looking at him expectantly. Tiago turns it over in his fingers, feeling the smooth porcelain dentures and the cold steel plate that will make up his cheek and palate.

“Try it on now, if you like,” she says happily, encouraging him with a nod of her head. Tiago wants to laugh at her- she obviously believes that as soon as he puts it in his mouth, all of his problems will be instantly resolved. How naïve to believe that all of his scars are on the surface.

But Tiago decides to indulge her, and he gingerly slides the cold apparatus in his mouth, wincing as the hard plastic scrapes against his swollen gums. There is a grotesque sucking noise and then a tiny snap, and he can feel that the prosthesis is secure. Tiago runs his tongue along the inside of his cheek experimentally, feeling the unnatural metal edges.

The nurse claps her hands together in excitement. “Oh, Mr. Rodriguez, you look wonderful! Good as new.” Tiago resists the urge to snap her neck. Instead, he smiles, feeling the smooth porcelain teeth against his lips. “Thank you,” he hears himself say, and he is shocked by the clarity of his voice. Missing the roof of his mouth has made it… difficult to speak, to say the least.

“Well. I’ll just leave you to get used to it, then! I’ll come back in about an hour to assess any discomfort,” the nurse says cheerfully, sweeping out the door and leaving Tiago alone in his bed.

Tiago lies there for a while, adjusting to the foreign feeling in his mouth. Finally he gets out of bed and walks over to the bathroom, almost afraid to turn on the lights and look at his reflection. What if he doesn’t recognize himself?

Steeling himself, Tiago flips the switch and faces the mirror head-on.

The man who stares back at him is not Tiago, exactly, but certainly not the monster he had seen with the drooping eye and the caved-in jaw. His cheek has been restored to its normal shape, and his jaw is now angular rather than lopsided. He can’t overlook his skeletal frame and the deep, bruise-colored bags underneath his eyes, but this would have to do. For now, at least. Tiago grins, gazing upon his new shark’s smile of perfect white teeth. _Unsettling._

This new face needs a new name. _Silver_ , Tiago thinks to himself with a wry smile as his lank gray hair catches the light. _Silva._

\--

He is discharged from the hospital two weeks later, a man who shouldn’t be alive. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. He is dead on paper, at least, and this knowledge fills Tiago both with a sense of freedom and incredible rage. _They should have saved him._

He has absolutely no personal items to his name, and no money. That can be solved easily enough, but first he needs a computer. Still clad in his bland standard-issue hospital clothes, Tiago makes his way to the nearest public library and, using a tediously slow desktop computer, proceeds to siphon approximately 2 million dollars into an anonymous bank account into the Caymans. That should suffice for the time being.

Now, he needs money and clothes. Possibly a gun. Tiago hangs around a payphone for a while until he spots a middle-aged woman walking by, and he practically throws himself on her asking for change. Her eyes widening at his haggard appearance, she shoves a handful of yen in his palm and bolts, glancing over her shoulder as she goes.

Tiago swiftly picks up the phone and dials one of his contacts in Hong Kong. This isn’t strictly official: when he had worked for MI6 and gotten into the hacking business, he had made certain… connections that M would have undoubtedly disapproved of. _What Mummy didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her._

“Hello?” grunts a deep voice in Mandarin on the other line.

“Xiāo. This is Rodriguez.” Tiago’s voice is flat, and his old name feels foreign in his mouth.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Rodriguez?” Xiāo responds quickly, his tone suddenly formal and strained. Tiago grins to himself- back before his capture, he had gained the reputation of a man who didn’t like being talked down to.

“I need supplies.”

\--

Three hours later, Tiago’s contact meets him in a deserted Guangzhou parking lot, arms laden with several bags of clothes and electronics.

“Xiāo,” Tiago says quietly, bowing slightly. A hot slice of anger flares up within him as he sees the look of shock on the man’s face at his drastically changed appearance.

“Mr. Rodriguez,” Xiāo stutters, attempting to compose himself. “I think you’ll find that everything is in order.”

“Thank you,” Tiago replies, taking the largest bag from the man’s hand and looking inside. He pulls out a sleek black Beretta handgun and examines it closely, the afternoon light glinting dully off the cold metal. “Beautiful.”

_Fully loaded._

Xiāo glances at him nervously. “If I may ask, what brings you here?”

Tiago takes his time answering, his eyes darkening as he stares at the other man. “I seem to have found myself in a… compromising situation. As it is, I must start over completely. In fact, it would be best if nobody knows that I’m alive.” He absentmindedly turns off the safety, bouncing the gun lightly in his right hand.

Xiāo is silent for a moment, his eyes darting to his car that sits parked several yards away. When he speaks again, his voice is unnaturally high. “Well. I’m sure that won’t be a problem, Mr. Rodriguez.”

Tiago’s voice is cold and completely devoid of emotion. “I have a feeling you’re right.”

Without blinking, he slowly raises the handgun so that it points directly between the other man’s eyes.

He pulls the trigger.

\--

Humming to himself, Tiago steps over Xiāo’s cooling body and pulls the man’s car keys out of his pocket. Collecting the bags of supplies, he strolls over to the slick black Mercedes and climbs inside, savoring the feel of the soft leather against his skin.

Tiago revs the engine and speeds out of the parking lot, regarding Xiāo’s corpse in the rearview mirror with a crooked smirk. _He was a liability._

A few hours later he’s in Hong Kong, not bothering to worry about the license plate on Xiāo’s car. He can get another one soon enough. Tiago pulls into a parking lot adjacent to his colossal hotel and rummages through the bags of supplies to find a change of clothes. Relieved to find an acceptable looking suit, Tiago throws off his drab hospital clothes and tosses them out the window, never wanting to see them again.

Tiago checks in to the penthouse suite, a secret smile creeping on his face as he signs the name _Raoul Silva_ with a flourish at the front desk. “Good evening, Mr. Silva,” says the receptionist in heavily accented English. Tiago grins his new shark’s smile, bowing his head graciously. “Yes, it is.”

Tiago takes the lift up to his suite on the 40th floor, reveling in the opulent décor as he opens the door and flips on the lights. It is almostoverwhelming, after being detained in squalor for five months and then trapped in the hospital for two more.

Tiago inhales deeply, savoring the taste of his freedom. But the transformation isn’t complete just yet: there are still a few things that he has to do. Opening one of the smaller bags from Xiāo, Tiago produces two boxes of blonde hair dye and a plastic contacts case. Whistling, he walks into the luxurious marble bathroom and opens the box of dye, pulling on the enclosed rubber gloves with an exaggerated snap. He looks at his patchy gray hair in the mirror for the last time, his face twisting involuntarily into a pained expression. _Pathetic._

Tiago mixes up two packets of dye and spreads them liberally over his shaggy hair, watching with a satisfied smile as the bleach leaches out any remaining color. This gesture feels important, somehow; like his past is fading to nothing at the same time.

Half an hour later, the dye is set, and Tiago sticks his head underneath the faucet to wash out the bleach. When he looks up at his reflection again, he barely recognizes himself. This man is… dangerous. Strangely attractive, maybe, but wrong somehow. Tiago brushes a stray lock of hair out of his eye, the pale color a contrast to the deep bags underneath his eyes. Somehow he knows that these will never completely go away.

The only things immediately recognizable are his eyes, chocolate-brown and betraying of the man he had once been- although they never quite regained their old brightness. _This can be fixed._

Tiago opens his contacts case and pops the two dark blue disks into his eyes, squinting in discomfort as his body adjusts to the intrusion.

When he looks at himself again, it’s perfect. _Disconcerting_ is the right word, Tiago thinks to himself as he edges closer to the mirror. His eyes are now almost impossible to discern in color and have the unsettling appearance of complete lifelessness.

Tiago chuckles as he remembers what his grandmother used to say: “The eyes are the window to the soul.”

And his look… _dead._

\--

That night, Tiago goes out.

He picks up a slender young man at a bar and savagely fucks him against the wall of his hotel bedroom with absolutely none of the gentleness he had shown in the past. He keeps his shirt on, not wanting to see the horror and pity that his scars would provoke. When they’re done, Tiago tells him to leave without a trace of tenderness in his voice, the boy’s eyes growing wide with barely concealed fear. 

As soon as the boy is gone, Tiago locks himself in the bathroom and steps inside the shower, closing his eyes and sighing as the hot water courses over his battered body.

He is suddenly overwhelmed with utter hopelessness. A choked noise escaping his chest, Tiago slowly slides down the tiled wall and curls up on the floor, pressing his face to the ground as he had done so many times in prison. His shock of blonde hair is plastered to his forehead, and a barely healed scar on his chest is starting to ache. _He has nothing, nothing to live for._  

“What more do I have to lose?” Tiago whispers, his voice cracking with emotion. “What more can you take from me?” He isn’t sure who he’s speaking to any more.

Minutes pass. Finally Tiago picks himself up off the ground, his entire body shaking. Wrapping his waist in a towel, he stands once more before the mirror, taking in the scarred wreckage that is his body. His face is calm, almost handsome, belying the madness within. This man staring back at him with the unnatural hair and eyes is different from anyone Tiago has ever known.

 _Nobody has to know what lies beneath_ , Tiago thinks, absentmindedly running his tongue over the ridge of his prosthesis.

Tiago had never believed in fate. But in this moment, he isn’t Tiago any more.

Now he is Silva, and Silva knows that something stronger than himself is keeping him tethered to this world. There must be a _purpose_ to the life that he hates- the life that has clung to him when he despised it the most.  

But what is it? Why has he survived? Silva furrows his brow, caught between the desire to laugh and the urge to smash his reflection into a million pieces.

And then suddenly, he knows.

He has survived because the job isn’t done.

He needs closure.

_He needs to show her what she has made him._

\--

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Tiago says "Forgive me" right before he takes the cyanide capsule.


End file.
